Address by Kelvin Thomson, MP for Wills, to the Australian Capital Territory Branch of Sustainable Population Australia, Wednesday 10 February 2009

When I spoke in the Parliament in August last year about population I advanced two propositions – first that the world’s population needed to be stabilised, and second that Australia’s population needed to be stabilised. I called for a national debate on the population issue and the need for population reform.

Maybe there is a bit of selfishness on each side. Those for higher population like the markets and money and political donations that come from industries that profit from higher population. Those against ask like Carr: “What’s wrong with a bit of space? What’s wrong with the possibility of being able to get to a beach and get onto the beach . . .

People and Place

The 35-million projection was prepared by the Commonwealth Treasury. It parallels recent Australian Bureau of Statistics and state government population projections. All assume that the current record high net migration levels and high fertility (relative to a few years ago) will continue.

Kyoto was seen as an Earth-saving agreement. In reality, pitifully few of those who signed up to it delivered on their commitments. In 1996, the World Food Summit in Rome pledged to cut the number of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition by half before 2015. The target was to reduce world hunger to less than 420 million people. In 2009, the World Bank calculated that the numbers had risen to over 1 billion.